Rolandt

One of my great loves is Dewey. I share his belief that an educated engaged populace is crucial to democracy and democracy is crucial to the profession of those teaching in democracies. I think part of what we need to do is make sure all citizens have the tools they need to sort news from noise and speak truth to power.

At the same time, often when I speak to people, the questions come up — sure, media literacy is good, but how do we reach the people who drop out of high school, the people who don’t go to college. And so on.

Have I said enough that this is important? Well, here’s the other shoe dropping: our most pressing problems are not caused by Joe or Jane the Mechanic not getting a GED. They are caused by people in power — mid-level gatekeepers and up — who are allowing institutions to be corrupted by misinformation.

You can leave all the complaints about that formulation in the comments. I’ll admit that elites have always been prone to elite misinformation (see Iraq, Vietnam, Climate Change). But I would assert that such history shows the disasters that result when institutions become corrupted. The current configuration feels unique to me and other misinfo experts I talk to. The speed and frequency with which lies are created god knows where and then pushed up the chain to people with professional and political power is what’s frightening. High school dropouts are not your problem. Trump supporting gas station owners or conspiracy-minded baristas are not your problem. Your problem is the FBI agent consuming Twitter nonsense,  the politician that not only uses disinfo but comes to believe it, and the blue checkmarked mid-level elites that are unwitting vehicles pushing that stuff relentlessly into the view of those who act on it.

I started off with Dewey, and Jane the Mechanic. Here’s the relation. While mass education is good and should be pursued as a long-term solution, if I was going to target our online literacy immediately and had a limited number of seats, I would target it at everyone that will find their way to positions of influence. Politicians. Policy leads. Product managers at tech startups. Future FBI agents and social workers and department heads. I would look at the gears of democratic institutions — political, civic, administrative — and see who has their hands on the levers, from the mid-level bureaucrats to the top.

I’m committed to implementing our program broadly, but if you think the misinformation problem is Jane the Mechanic and her one vote every four years you’ve got it backwards. For immediate impact target those who make and enforce decisions and those who influence them, and stop scapegoating those without power or influence.

I need to think about this too in terms of how we grow the Digital Polarization Initiative. We’ve had good success in first-year programs, and we need to continue that. But the nature of our moment (and our limited resources) may require us to think about how to target this more efficiently as we expand. If people have some ideas of the sort of college programs we should be trying to get this training into, let me know in the comments. We probably need to also tap into the fact that the core of the American Democracy Project is still students who plan to go into those positions of influence and power and the faculty who teach them. More later I think.

Edward Hasbrouck has written a delightfully exhaustive review of the Gemini PDA:

A year after my initial review, and six months after I received my Gemini, here’s a detailed update on what works, what doesn’t, what Planetcom needs to do to deliver on the promise of the Gemini (and the promises made to Indiegogo backers), and — most importantly — how to decide whether you should buy a Gemini to use on your travels.

The Holy Grail for many travelers-who-work-while-traveling is a compact, always-connected device, with a big (enough) screen and a big (enough) keyboard, running open source software.

As Edward’s review makes clear, the Gemini is a device tantalizingly close to this ideal, but with some serious issues, especially software-related, that would make it difficult to rely on as the only device in your travel bag.

Serge Ravet, Learning Futures, Oct 23, 2018

This is a nice blending of Kirkpatrick levels of course assessment and open badges. It begins as a criticism of Kirkpatrick's use of badges ("I find it outstanding that after a mere 3-hour training, participants receive a badge specifying that they are able, among other things, to 'plan and deliver training programs with business value in mind.'"). Instead, Serge proposes " to define what I coined as K3 Badges—’K' for Kirkpatrick and ‘3’ for level 3." These are badges that would be certified not by the training institution or the learner, but by managers in the workplace (at K3, signifying that the learning is being applied on the job). This is a lovely idea, and extends the concept of badges in a potentially useful direction. Now all it needs is Bluetooth. I mean, Blockchain. Image: Clan Kirkpatrick badge.

Beds are useful. I enjoyed my bed at the hotel last night. But you won't find a pattern called bed in A Pattern Language, and that's because we don't have a problem with beds. Beds are solved. What we have a problem with is building with beds. And that's why, if you look in A Pattern Language, you'll find there are a number of patterns that involve beds.

Now, the analogy I want to make is, basically, the design patterns in the book Design Patterns are at the same level as the building blocks in the book A Pattern Language. So Bridge, which is one of the design patterns, is the same kind of thing as column. You can call it a pattern, but it's not really a pattern that gets at the root problem we're trying to solve. And if Alexander had written a book that had a pattern called Bed and another one called Chair, I imagine that that book would have failed and not inspired all of the people that the actual book did inspire. So that, I claim, is why patterns failed.

Those two nearly-sequential paragraphs are from Patterns Failed. Why? Should We Care?, a talk Brian Marick gave at Deconstruct 2017. It's a good talk. Marick's provocative claim that, as an idea, software patterns failed is various degrees of true and false depending on how you define 'patterns' and 'failed'. It's hard to declare the idea an absolute failure, because a lot of software developers and UI designers use patterns to good effect as a part of their work every day. But I agree with Brian that software patterns failed to live up to their promise or to the goals of the programmers who worked so hard to introduce Christopher Alexander's work to the software community. I agree, too, that the software pattern community's inability to document and share patterns at the granularity that made Alexander's patterns so irresistible is a big part of why.

I was a second- or third-generation member of the patterns community, joining in after Design Patterns had been published and, like Marick, I worked mostly on the periphery. Early on I wrote patterns that related to my knowledge-based systems work. Much of my pattern-writing, though, was at the level of elementary patterns, the patterns that novice programmers learn when they are first learning to program. Even at that level, the most useful patterns often were ones that operated up one level from the building blocks that novices knew.

Consider Guarded Linear Search, from the Loop Patterns paper that Owen Astrachan and I workshopped at PLoP 1998. It helps beginners learn how to arrange a loop and an if statement in a way that achieves a goal. Students in my beginning courses often commented how patterns like this one helped them write programs because, while they understood if statements and for statements and while statements, they didn't always know what to do with them when facing a programming task. At that most elementary level, the Guarded Linear Search pattern was a pleasing -- and useful -- whole.

That said, there aren't many "solved problems" for beginners, so we often wrote patterns that dropped down to the level of building blocks simply to help novices learn basic constructs. Some of the Loop Patterns paper does that, as does Joe Bergin's Patterns for Selection. But work in the elementary patterns community would have been much more valuable, and potentially had more effect, if we had thought harder about how to find and document patterns at the level of Alexander's patterns.

Perhaps the patterns sub-community in which I've worked in which best achieved its goals was the pedagogical patterns community. These are not software patterns but rather patterns of teaching techniques. They document solutions to problems that teachers face every day. I think I'd be willing to argue that the primary source of pedagogical patterns' effectiveness is that these solutions combine more primitive building blocks (delivery techniques, feedback techniques, interaction techniques) in a way that make learning and instruction both more effective and more fun. As a result, they captured a lot of teachers' interest.

I think that Marick's diagnosis also points out the error in a common criticism of software patterns. Over the years, we often heard folks say that software patterns existed only because people used horrible languages like C++ and Java. In a more powerful language, any purported pattern would be implemented as a language primitive or could be made a primitive by writing a macro. But this misses the point of Alexander's insight. The problem in software development isn't with inheritance and message passing and loops, just as the problem in architecture isn't with beds and windows and space. It's with finding ways to arrange these building blocks in a way that's comfortable and nice and, to use Alexander's term, "life-giving". That challenge exists in all programming languages.

Finally, you probably won't be surprised to learn that I agree with Marick that we should all care that software patterns failed to live up to their promise. Making software is fun, but it's also challenging. Alexander's idea of a pattern language is one way that we might help programmers do their jobs better, enjoy their jobs more, and produce software that is both functional and habitable. The first pass was a worthy effort, and a second pass, informed by the lessons of the first, might get us closer to the goal.

Thanks to Brian for giving this talk and to the folks at Deconstruct for posting it online. Go watch it.

mkalus shared this story from The Omni Group.

We’ve released a whole bunch of big updates lately — OmniFocus 3 for Mac, yes, and plenty more — and we’re continuing to work on OmniFocus for the Web. (We’ve just added a new round of testers.)

As a result, our sales and support teams are working through a larger-than-usual number of requests for help. CEO Ken Case writes that “helping lots of new customers is a good problem to have!”

But we should let you know what’s up, and so Brian Covey, Support Manager, writes on our forum that we’re continuing to pull out all the stops, and that we’re making progress toward getting back to normal — but, in the meantime, we most sincerely appreciate your understanding. Thank you!

It’s also worth knowing that there are other ways to get questions answered, too. The apps include extensive manuals. Our support site is searchable. You can jump on our forums or join our Slack group — sometimes your question will already have been asked and answered, and other times another user of the app might have an answer you’re looking for.

And, again, we appreciate your patience as we get back to our normal quick turnaround.

After upgrading to VDSL vectoring with a 100 Mbit/s downlink and 40 Mbit/s uplink in Cologne recently, I soon figured out what to do with the additional uplink speed: Advanced synchronization with my network behind a fiber line in Paris. Equally soon I noticed that no longer is my access link the bottleneck but rather under-dimensioned backbone links. So I had to find a way to creatively route my traffic around the problem.

While most of my servers automatically synchronize over night and usually at the full speed my lines have to offer, i.e. 40 Mbit/s, I have some machines that I occasionally interact during daytime and in the evening and data transfers of several gigabytes at a time are not an exception. In other words, if there is a throughput problem it immediately becomes apparent. And I soon noticed that especially during evening hours, the backbone links can’t by far support such data rates and there is significant packet loss. To further investigate I started running a script that automatically transferred data once an hour to see what the throughput is. Quite to my surprise it soon showed that throughput is usually o.k. until around 8 pm in the evening at which time there is a sharp and dramatic drop in throughput from 40 Mbit/s down to 2-4 Mbit/s or even less and a massive increase in packet loss. Things get back to normal at around midnight.

Obviously this is quite unsatisfactory so I started experimenting. Instead of directly communicating between my Cologne and Paris sites, I established SSH tunnels from each end to a server located in the cloud. When using this detour I get full speed at any time during the day. A traceroute from each end shows that different backbone links are used which seem not to suffer from congestion. I’ve been observing this for at least two months now and things have not really improved, somebody really doesn’t care that their transit or peering is hopelessly under-dimensioned for evening traffic.

I could start complaining now but what are the chances that things would change? Probably not very high so I won’t even bother. Instead, I’ve made sure my semi-automatic man-in-the-middle SSH setup works without too much hassle and rather work around the problem creatively.

Auf macOS benutze ich Safari, auf Windows Edge. Für schwierige Fälle habe ich noch Firefox. Und Edge wird immer besser. Ich lese damit nicht nur PDFs und ePubs, mittlerweile schützt er wunderbar vor Tracking durch alle möglichen bösen Buben sondern verhindert auch, dass auf Webseiten irgendwelche Audio- oder Videoclips losplärren. Sehr nett.

Dutch rites of passage: the little one moving from the front seat to the back seat on our bicycles. She’s getting too heavy to sit up front as it begins to influence the steering.

As if Google wasn’t having a tough enough weekend, details about the Pixel Slate have leaked too.

Devices under the codename ‘Nocturne’ — long associated with the Pixel Slate — have popped up on Geekbench.

In total, four different benchmarks appeared, with four different chipsets. This likely means we’ll see many Pixelbooks at Google’s upcoming hardware event.

One of the Pixel Slate devices sports an Intel Celeron 3965Y. The processor is clocked at 1.5 GHz and has two cores.

Another uses the Intel Core m3-8100Y clocked at 3.4 GHz.

The last two use Intel Core chips, one being the i5-8200Y with two cores at 3.9 GHz and the other being an i7-8500Y at 4.2 GHz with two cores.

The Celeron and m3 models also list 8GB of RAM, while the i5 and i7 models had 16GB of RAM.

Additionally, the Geekbench records show testing on each chip used 64-bit Android. This means that we’re looking at a Chromebook capable of running Android apps, not a device running Android.

The savvy analysts at @slashgear on pictures of a laptop: “Keep your money on Pixel Slate if you’re betting…”

Because the first form factor that comes to mind when you hear “slate” is traditional laptop, right?

[https://t.co/osUAr2ZemI]

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) October 6, 2018

However, not all are convinced the leaks show the Pixel Slate. Evan Blass, who frequently leaks upcoming devices on Twitter, indicated the Pixel Slate would not be a traditional laptop.

Regardless, considering the power of the Nocturne devices and that they’ll be able to run Windows 10, they should prove popular in any form factor.

We’ll see if Blass is right about the Slate at Google’s event on October 9th.

Update 10/06/18: It looks like Blass may have been right. Pictures of the Pixel Slate have leaked, revealing a more tablet-like device.

Furthermore, the pictures show off a new keyboard cover accessory.

The Pixel Slate leak shows a tablet device in a dark blue colour with decent bezels around the screen. You can also see the cutout for the fingerprint sensor and the volume keys on the sides. There is also a USB-C port on the side.

The back of the device features a subtle ‘G’ logo in the top left corner.

The keyboard case is particularly interesting, with circular keys. Additionally, the keyboard sports an Assistant key and a “hamburger” button at the top right.

Update – 10/08/18: Reputable and reliable device leaker Evan Blass has shared yet another picture of the Pixel Slate with a keyboard.

There's more to life than phones. pic.twitter.com/qRyuwbNKWA

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) October 8, 2018

Source: PhoneArena, AboutChromebooks, MySmartPrice Via: SlashGear, 9to5 Google

The post Pixel Slate and keyboard case pictures, benchmarks leak [Update] appeared first on MobileSyrup.

That's just one graph taken out of a very detailed report. And a money quote:

Overall the new A12 Vortex cores and the architectural improvements on the SoC’s memory subsystem give Apple’s new piece of silicon a much higher performance advantage than Apple’s marketing materials promote. The contrast to the best Android SoCs have to offer is extremely stark – both in terms of performance as well as in power efficiency. Apple’s SoCs have better energy efficiency than all recent Android SoCs while having a nearly 2x performance advantage. I wouldn’t be surprised that if we were to normalise for energy used, Apple would have a 3x performance efficiency lead.

When I hear somebody go "Apple does not innovate, yada yada yada" I know I found an ignorant person. Dive into this report to see what is really going on. Apple's silicon is now on Intel Silver Lake desktop level. That's a PC with a powercord, not a battery.

More >

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh defended himself in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He says you can trust him to be impartial. Did he undo the damage he did during his hearing last week? Just a reminder: the purpose of this blog is to reveal what’s really going on with written communications. I’m … Continued

The post Does the Brett Kavanaugh op-ed make its case? appeared first on without bullshit.

Sans Forgetica is a downloadable font that is scientifically designed to help you remember your study notes.

Bullshit detection meter looks nervous. Me thinks handwritten notes work better. My handwriting works like encryption. I can read it, sometimes.

More >

There is a button on each album or playlist that says Shuffle. If you hit that button, it will shuffle your tracks. And if you hit it again, it will re-shuffle instead of turning shuffle mode off.

The toggle is hidden somewhere else. Go to the mini-player at the bottom of the page, open that sheet until you see a large artwork. Now push that screen up until you see the Shuffle and Repeat toggles.

This brilliant UX is brought to you by the same people who also designed Airplay 2 so that most people get it completely wrong.

Earlier this year I ran into my neighbour Christina on Prince Street and she told me that she’d just walked home from Charlottetown Airport; it only took 90 minutes, she reported, and had been a lovely walk.

I joined the Passenger Advisory Panel of Charlottetown Airport this fall, and our first meeting was scheduled for yesterday at noon. Inspired by Christina, and mindful that ground transportation would be one of the topics on the agenda, I resolved to get to and from the airport using novel means.

Believe it or not, you can get to the airport by public transit, a little-known feature of the city’s transit system.

Route № 11, the Airport to Winsloe North Collector, makes 7 counter-clockwise trips in the morning from Charlottetown Mall to the airport, a trip that takes 8 minutes, and makes 4 clockwise trips in the afternoon, a trip that takes 17 minutes. Given that the Charlottetown Mall is the northern hub of the transit system, it’s thus possible, with a transfer, to get to the airport from almost anywhere in the city. At only 11 trips a day it’s not enough service to rely on there being a bus for all arrivals and departures at the airport, but it’s also not nothing.

I caught the 11:15 a.m. Route № 1 bus from the Confederation Centre of the Arts on Grafton Street, arriving at the Mall at 11:30, and then transferred to Route № 11 at 11:45 a.m., arriving at the airport just before noon (note that the bus doesn’t actually go into the airport; you need to disembark at the corner of Maple Hills and Sherwood, before the bus turns left).

Both the Route № 1 and Route № 11 buses included a cowcatcher-style bicycle rack, which allowed me to take my bicycle with me to the airport for the route back. Which is exactly what I did; here’s my route as tracked by Google Fit:

I rode out of the airport on Sherwood Road, through the roundabout and down the hill past the cemetery; when I reached the Confederation Trail I turned left and followed the trail all the way downtown, past the Charlottetown Mall, UPEI, the Experimental Farm and Joe Ghiz Park, emerging from the trail only when I got to Cumberland Street by the Maritime Electric plant. The journey was remarkably flat, with the only mildly-challenging bits being from the airport up to the roundabout, and the stretch that’s slightly uphill before UPEI. And most of the trip was on the trail, making it both car-free and scenic.

Remarkably, given that I’m not in shape, and that I faced a headwind most of the way, the journey only took 31 minutes from airport to my front door on Prince Street.

When ground transportation came up at the meeting I talked about my journey there and the plans for my journey back, and suggested that, while bus and bike might never be the predominant way of getting to and from the airport, it should at least be publicized as an option, if only to drive home the fact that the airport is among the most convenient to get to, by any means, of any airport in Canada.

Monday is Thanksgiving in Canada[1], so please excuse your Canadian colleagues for not being in the office.

We’ll likely be spending the day wondering. We’ll be wondering how family could make such a mess, wondering why we ate so much pie, wondering if it’s okay to eat turkey for breakfast, wondering if pie can be a meal and dessert at the same time, wondering how we fit the leftovers in the fridge, wondering why we bothered hosting this year, wondering whose sock that is by the stairs, wondering when the snow will melt[2] or start to fall[3].

We’ll also be wondering who started the family tradition of having cornbread instead of buttered rolls, wondering where the harvest tradition began, wondering about what all goes into harvesting our food, wondering what it means to be thankful, wondering what we are thankful for, wondering why we ate the evening meal at 4pm, wondering whether 4pm is too late to have a nap.

With heads full of wondering and bellies full of food, we wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving. We’ll be back to work, if not our normal shapes, on Tuesday.

:chutten

PS: Canadian Pro-tip: Leftover food often turns into regret – but this regret can turn back into food if you leave it in the fridge for a little while!

[1]: https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/PR/Holidays%3A+Canada
[2]: Calgary had a (record) snowfall of 32.8cm (1’1″) on Oct 2: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-october-snow-day-two-1.4848394
[3]: Snow’s a-coming, already or eventually: https://weather.gc.ca/canada_e.html

South Korean electronics giant Samsung has posted its projected third quarter 2018 earnings.

According to an October 5th, 2018 media release, Samsung expects that its sales will total 65 trillion Korean Won (KRW) — approximately $74.35 billion CAD.

Samsung also expects that its operating profit will total 14.53 trillion KRW (roughly $16.63 billion CAD).

It’s worth noting that these numbers don’t reflect Samsung’s actual Q3 2018 earnings. Rather, they’re projections that Samsung typically releases two or three weeks before the company’s actual earnings go live.

Additionally, South Korean disclosure regulations don’t allow companies to post earnings estimates as a range. As such, Samsung’s figures represent a median value.

Source: Samsung

The post Samsung estimates Q3 2018 earnings will total $74.35 billion appeared first on MobileSyrup.

via GIPHY

In just under three weeks the free, one-day event Learning on/with the Open Web (OWLTEH) will be happening in Coventry. It should prove a lot of fun, and you can get a sense of some of the talks happening here (that site nicely highlighting the value of the TRU Writer SPLOT). I am planning on doing a workshop with Lauren Heywood and Daniel Villar-Rubio on SPLOTs as well as convening a presentation/panel with Anne-Marie Scott and Tony Hirst in which we talk a bit about the open web for teaching and learning at the level of the infrastructure. I pushed out an abstract here, but this is still a work in progress:

The emergence of an abstracted, containerized infrastructure for the open web poses all sorts of questions about the future. Focusing on everything from the shift from RSS to APIs, the rise of containers, and the talk of “serverless” stack, this panel will attempt to explain these developments and make sense of what open web infrastructure could look for higher education in the near future.

Probably needs some work, but that’s the least of my worries. I am in the middle of trying to get a Windows 95 boot emulated on a mid-90s computer and even creating a local area network to reproduce sites from circa 1995. We’ll see how that goes, and also I am in need of some 90s websites if you have an idea or two submit them here for the Teaching and Learning on the 90s Web Exhibit, submissions here please

??Loading…

I’m gonna have a busy weekend, I am in over my head! 

Purism has lost an important voice. We are deeply saddened to learn that our colleague James M. Rufer has passed away on September 27th, 2018, at the age of 39. He is survived by his loving wife Mary; sons Xander and Paxton; mother-in-law Sylvia; and friends he made outside and inside Purism.

James has been with Purism since its early days, being the very first team member to join and has remained a dedicated, honest, hardworking chap who brought enjoyment to our lives daily.

Purism is a team of people located in all corners of the world, and those of us who have had the privilege to meet James in person know that his human qualities were a model to us all. James was one of the warmest, pure-hearted and kind people you can find, and had a passion for bringing ethical technology within the reach of the general public. I wish he lived on to see the long-term impact of his efforts on society.

James was the customer’s advocate as director of product, and also the cheerful voice of Purism on social media from 2016 to this day. If you have interacted with Purism on Twitter, Mastodon, Google+, Facebook and other outlets, know that in 99% of cases, you had been discussing with James. He was also the main writer behind the “Frequently Asked Questions” area of our website, and the shift in tone in our social media interactions when he took over in 2016 was largely thanks to him and his humane, down-to-earth approach.

In recent months, James had been deeply involved in defining requirements and improvements to our current and future products.

More importantly, James was not just a close collaborator, he had quickly become a personal friend of mine. We shared the joys, the laughter and the burdens of moving mountains to fulfill our mission as a social purpose corporation taking on the world against all odds.

I and various Purism team members will be travelling to attend James’ memorial service this Saturday.

In honor of James, we hope to engrave his name into the interior of the Librem 5 phone. We are working with his close family to support them in these difficult times. Additionally, we are giving James a special send-off and honoring his wife’s request by having James’ remains sent to space in 2019 for his kids. It will be a farewell for him, and he will return to earth and burn up as a “shooting star”.

Goodbye James, you will be sorely missed.
— Jeff

Many purists join me in mourning him, and some here wanted to add below a personal public statement to this effect.

Mladen Pejaković said:

Farewell James, I’ll miss our meetings and the fun and laugh we had. Rest in peace, dear colleague.

David Seaward said:

I finally got to meet James in person this year after working with him remotely. I had always admired his affability, warmth and respect for people, but was really blown away when I got to experience those qualities from him first-hand. I remember how lucky I felt to get to know such a great guy better. How lucky I felt that there was someone at work so capable of bringing those attributes which are all too often missing in our industry. I wish I could preserve that feeling and that memory in a bottle and leave it here for his children so that they could know what a humble and humane man their father was. I hope his family and friends know how much his colleagues appreciated him.

Everyone in our finance team said:

All is silent with James. Rest in peace, brother. Your colleagues here are dedicated to carrying our shared ideals to the four corners of the globe. A tribute to you and the life you led…

Todd Weaver said:

The universe is less bright without James in it and I will miss him immensely. He was a funny, thoughtful, and caring person who brightened up everything just by being present.

Nicole Færber said:

During a lifetime one meets a lot of people. Some you like to forget instantaneously again, some you are fine to work with but you don’t want them to be around more than necessary, some are good pals for a party, a hangout or a special occasion, some are great to talk to.

And then there are some people who you simply enjoy having around you whenever and wherever, who fill any room with kindness, understanding and empathy, who make you feel welcome, understood and accepted, unconditionally—this is what James was to me.

I had the honor and pleasure to work with James, mostly remote over the Internet, but still his positive energy could always be felt, even through the wires. Just a few weeks ago we finally had the pleasure to meet in person and enjoyed a wonderful time together with the team, which even further increased our bond.

James leaves a big hole in our hearts.
Our thoughts are with his family now, his wife and children.

Farewell James, may peace be with you, we miss you. We will try our best to keep your spirit alive, but it will never be the same without you.

François Téchené a dit:

Thank you James. Thank you for having been such a great colleague, such a nice and bright person. Thank you for having been my friend. I am very proud to have been working with you, for the last three years, on making the world a better place. It feels empty without you. I will sincerely miss you. May you know peace forever.

Zlatan Todorić said:

James and I have been working together for nearly three years, so we had time to become friends. Even though we never met in person, I can say that James was a rare genuinely good, kind-hearted person. His presence in our chats, and his voice in our meetings were soothing to me. He will be dearly missed but he will live through-out our memories of him. His beliefs in a better world will continue to live in me forever. Thank you my friend for having presence in my life and may you watch over us wherever you are now.

Heather Ellsworth said:

James was always a pleasure to work with and had a wonderful way of making his team members around the world laugh. I feel fortunate to have been his teammate and he will always have a fond place in my thoughts. My deepest sympathies go out to the family in this difficult time and may they too find peace in their cherished memories.

Kyle Rankin said:

People in technology have a tendency to solve problems in a way that suits only their own selfish needs. But not James. The word advocate gets overused these days, to the point that it sometimes has lost its meaning. Yet James was a real and true advocate for technology working for everyone, not out of some cynical drive to grow market share, but because that’s where his heart was. He believed that technology should be accessible and intuitive, and he consistently pushed to improve everything we did with that in mind. Those fingerprints are in everything we have made so far. If only we had more people with a heart like James in technology, we would all be much better off.

Chris Lamb said:

Whilst I never had the privilege of meeting James in-person I will not quickly forget the many thoughtful conversations and interactions I had with him. That he appeared to make an immediate impact on everyone who was fortunate enough to have come across him, even through the oft-distancing medium of faceless and impersonal technology, is truly a credit to his character. My deepest sympathies towards his wife and his children.

Theodotos Andreou wrote:

Farewell beloved colleague. Purism will miss you.

The post In memory of James M. Rufer appeared first on Purism.

Jason Koebler, Motherboard, Oct 17, 2018

As Doug Belshaw says on Mastodon, "Proprietary software is what proprietary vendors do." In this case, that the proprietary vendors do is write an application that presents people from repairing their MacBooks. " The new system will render the computer “inoperative” unless a proprietary Apple “system configuration” software is run after parts of the system are replaced." Yet another reason for me to stay far far away from Apple products.

Cristian T. Duque, Moodle News, Oct 19, 2018

On the one hand, some people will say that the world of educational technology will resist decentralization. On the other hand, that same world can't kill it completely. A case in point is RSS, the ultimate decentralized technology, that lives on despite the efforts of even the might Google to kill it. RSS has been central to my own work for two decades, and the idea of a decentralized content and resource network is as robust today as it ever was. Maybe more so, give the now obvious failures of the social network platform model.

Greg Toppo, Inside Higher Ed, Oct 21, 2018

I do not like to get involved in U.S. politics because they are essentially the internal affairs of another country. However, Inside Higher Ed has published an article very sympathetic of Peter Cvjetanovic, one of the Charlottesville tiki torch marchers, and  Marc Johnson, the University of Nevada at Reno president who "had one clear, immediate thought: Cvjetanovic must graduate." The article depicts this case as one involving free speech (even though someone was actually killed at the far-right rally), but it is nothing of the sort. "Hate speech, after all, is protected just like other speech," says the article. No it isn't. It is a speech act, and specifically, a violent act, calculated to inflict harm on other people. Freedom and democracy are not about threats, intimidation and violence. Academic freedom doesn't grant the right to be racist and misogynist. People have a right to be protected from these people, even - especially! - on a university campus.

Dashun Wang, Harvard Business Review, Oct 22, 2018

In my own mind I often compare my own career to that of a musician. Such a career is a mixture of hit songs, near misses, duds, and even periods where nothing seems to be happening at all. And it's very relative; I've never had a gold record, but I could, but it isn't up to me, and doesn't really reflect my work in any case. And this randomness isn't just me; it rules across the board. "We used a given work’s number of citations (as provided by the Web of Science), auction price, and IMDB rating, respectively, as measures of quality and impact. We find that across these diverse careers, the random impact rule holds firm." So what's the lesson? "As long as you keep putting work out into the world, one project after another, your hot streak could be just around the corner." Or not. But it doesn't matter. Do the work. Keep researching, keep digging, keep developing. What happens, happens.